A tense, timely thriller with heart and a standout heroic lead.
This first installment in Lovett and Schultz’s political thriller series introduces a team of international experts dedicated to human rights.
In Yangon, Myanmar, a country ripped apart by a coup, 12-year-old Vika is arrested alongside his father for the crime of sharing poetry. News of Vika’s arrest reaches Kae Zhang, the fearless founder of the Geneva-based human rights organization Article 5. Kae and her diverse team of driven workers, each with personal experience of global displacement and discrimination, set to work on the tricky logistics of getting Kae into Myanmar to negotiate Vika’s release. With the help of her mentor, the crusty and brazen Reinhardt Allen, Kae and her number two, Anan, set off for Thailand, where they begin a dangerous journey across the border into Myanmar. Reinhardt engages a trusted guide named Champo and secures a meeting with a colonel who may be willing to negotiate—but only on his terms. As Kae moves through a shifting landscape of dangerous jungles, decimated villages, and unjust courts, Vika’s freedom seems to move ever further out of reach. Enemies soon appear on all sides—even back in Geneva, where the rest of the Article 5 team members start to feel the reverberations of their dangerous fight for the young boy’s life. Lovett and Schultz map familiar espionage tropes onto well-rendered real-world struggles; realistic fights for dignity and justice drive the action. The authors’ depictions of Myanmar—and of the terror imposed by its military rulers—feel both chilling and authentic, beginning with the assault on Vika’s shop, where “terror lingered in the air, an acrid burning smell.” Kae is an admirable hero with a compelling balance of impressive credentials and relatable insecurity. (She displays plenty of wit, as well: “I just channel my inner Sisyphus,” she says to explain her perseverance.) The cast of secondary characters at Article 5 is equally engaging; the team members are distinguished by vivid personalities and layered backstories. The shared histories and subtle shorthand between them hint at a whole world of fascinating previous adventures and ones to come as the series progresses.
A tense, timely thriller with heart and a standout heroic lead.Pub Date: April 22, 2026
ISBN: 9781644568842
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.
A middle-aged woman channels her best Miss Marple when she finds herself facing a nightmare from her past as she seeks to make sense of her present.
Jane Trevally is at a crossroads of sorts. After a traumatic childhood, she sought safety and solace in marriages with wealthy men. Now twice divorced and living with her four dogs in the crumbling English country mansion that is her birthright, she’s feeling the need to do something, to take a job, when one day a runaway dog turns up on her doorstep. The dog is chipped, and with the help of a local vet and her loyal stepson, Dexter Lombardi, Jane traces the dog’s home to the edge of Hampstead Heath, in London—a place that brings back the memory of a terrifying night from her youth, when a handsome man picked her up and took her back to this very house. Everything there felt wrong; she just managed to escape, certain that if she had stayed, she would have died that night. Now, soon after knocking on the door and returning the dog, she discovers that he had run away from an Airbnb near her house, where he had been staying with a young woman who seems to have disappeared. With the help of Dexter; his father, Tony, her second ex-husband; Tony’s former security enforcer, Tobias Wilson; and her own gift for connecting with people, Jane sets out to find the woman, taking her first steps on the path to becoming a private investigator. While Jane serves as the heart of the novel, Jewell also narrates chapters from several other characters’ points of view, all of which chip away at the horror that is the house on the Heath. By slowly revealing past and present simultaneously, Jewell keeps the mystery fresh as she plays with Gothic tropes and the timeless imagery of “a house of horrors” embodying human sin. She doesn’t flinch from exploring the depths of depravity in this house—and its humans.
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781668033906
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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